Parallels Coherence: The unholy marriage between OS X and Windows

Parallels has added a new feature to its recent beta called Coherence, and it …

Back when the Parallels beta was first announced in April (on the same day that Boot Camp was released), everyone started talking about the possibilities of running Mac and Windows apps side-by-side one day. Parallels made that easier for us, but at the time, we were still limited to this odd, virtual environment that many of us wished to escape.

There is a little-known feature built into the newest beta for Parallels, though, that will undoubtedly make everyone's virtualization lives that much better, called Coherence. It allows you to hide the Windows desktop and run Windows apps, through Parallel, side-by-side with your OS X applications as if they were all running together in one, big, happy family.

How is this possible? Why would you want to do that? Adam Pash of LifeHacker thought the same thing:

I know what you're thinking: Disgusting! Unnatural!

Trust me people, I felt weird about it, too, but after setting it up, I can tell you this much: Sometimes something that sounds so wrong can feel so right.

He goes through a pretty detailed set of instructions for how to set it all up, and it's really not all that complex. None of his tips are even required in order to run Parallels in Coherence mode, they're just recommended in order to "help keep the line between Windows and your Mac pretty thin."

His tips, after installing Parallels and a copy of Windows, include:

Auto-hiding the Windows taskbar or moving it to one side of the window (so that it doesn't overlap the dock)

Then, all you have to do is select "Coherence" from the View menu and you're all set to run programs from the two OSes side-by-side. You can even launch Windows apps from the Mac, which he details in his writeup as well. It makes use of a third-party app from VerySimple Dev since Parallels does not yet support this feature, but what Parallels does support now is "seamless drag and drop" between Windows and Mac.

Oh Parallels gods, thank you for bestowing this wonderful feature upon us. If only Apple would stop denying rumors of including such virtualization abilities in Leopard, we could all die happy.

Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui